Huawei Admits That It’s Cheating With Smartphone Benchmark Results

There has been some speculation that Huawei has been positively influencing smartphone benchmarks, and those suspicions have been confirmed both by independent tech site Anandtech as well as 3Mark, one of the creators of the popular benchmarking software.

Certain Huawei phones were equipped with software that automatically registered when particular benchmark software was running. If a benchmark was running, the phone allowed the system-on-a-chip to consume much more power than in normal circumstances, and the temperature throttle limit that usually applies was removed as well. As a result, the performance of the soc was much higher – even up to a whopping 90 percent – compared to normal, day to day circumstances.

This is effectively cheating, although Huawei prefers to call it a “performance mode”.

After the results were made public by Anandtech, the company was forced to reply. A spokesperson told that Huawei was ‘forced’ to cheat because other Chinese smartphone manufacturers are doing the same.

Huawei certainly isn’t a stranger to controversial news regarding cheating in (performance) reviews, as review samples of the P10 smartphones were equipped with fast ufs-storage, while some consumer models were equipped with regular EMMC storage, which is significantly slower.

On the other hand, Huawei certainly isn’t the first that has been caught cheating and inflating numbers in benchmark results – OnePlus, Samsung and HTC have done the same in the past – albeit to a much smaller extent.

As a response to AnandTech’s findings, 3DMark has verified the claims made by the website and has decided to delist affected Huawei devices from the benchmark list – meaning that they’ll be seen at the bottom without a score.